


Regret

by navaan



Category: 1872 (Comics), Marvel (Comics)
Genre: 1872 Issue #2, Alcoholic Tony, Angst, Character Death, Destiny, Friendship, Introspection, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Possibly Unrequited Love, Tony Angst, Tony-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-22
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-22 22:32:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4853033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The automaton is nothing but a broken machine. And maybe so is Tony.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Regret

**Author's Note:**

> Contains major character death, description of violence and killings and suicidal thoughts. This fic was written for my [Bingo Card square "destiny/prophecy"](http://navaan.livejournal.com/211950.html). Posting before _1872 #3_ comes out and josses the hell out of it. (Because I still hope that fortune was actually a message from still alive Steve, but I know the chances are slim, I know.)
> 
> You can also read and comment on Livejournal [here](http://navaan.livejournal.com/222416.html).

On the day that changed his life the automaton he'd built to dazzle women at parties, gave him a fortune, reading “This will be your legacy”, and Tony, in his blind belief in his own genius, stuffed the little paper into his pocket and went on his way, a spring in his step and a smile on his face.

But that was just it: Sometimes Tony was too smart for his own good. It wasn't news to him. His father used to say it with a hint of disdain, his teachers with exasperation. “Ungovernable,” was a word he'd heard quite a few times, before he got old enough to understand that charm could get you far in any society and helped him take his proper place in his family's business.

It had simply always been a fact of his life that he was smart. Up until today he'd not believed there was such a thing as being _too_ smart. And for some reason that was the only thought that stuck in his head as he witnessed the horror before him.

This wasn't a battlefield anymore, as soldier after soldier wearing the Confederate uniform fell down dead, ripped apart by bullets, their blood splattering and tainting the faces and uniforms of the soldiers that were pushing on behind them, just to topple next, falling to lie on top of their dead compatriots before they ever had a chance to see what they were walking into or understand why they should be running, giving up, letting the enemy win without a fight.

The sound, Tony thought, the damning sound of bullets fired at incredible speed should warn them, but they'd never seen a rifle like this. 

Nobody had. 

Because there simply hadn't been one like it before Tony Stark and his damnable smarts had thought it up and _created_ it.

The sound. The blood. The smell. The horror.

He closed his eyes, but knew that he would never be able to forget it – the things his brilliant mind had unleashed on the world, on his country.

When he’d arrived at his hotel room he took of his jacket, but found the slip of sturdy paper card that his silly automaton had spit out for him. His hand balled into a fist, crumpling the piece of paper and throwing it away.

How had he ever dared to believe that he could predict the future? This was like an evil joke, one of his own inventions mocking him by giving him a destiny he didn't want.

 _Too smart_ , he thought when he woke up at night, heart pounding in his chest, sweat drenched clothes clinging to his frame, he woke up from the nightmare he relived every night. _Too smart to see that they would use the weapon as more than a passive deterrent._

Land of the free.

Land of slaughterers.

Land of the smart.

He got out of bed to pour himself a drink, to hold back the nightmares, to help him sleep.

It was the first of many.

He didn't dare to look at the future again.

* * *

Two years later the nightmares were still coming and people had figured out that Tony Stark was struggling. He'd been always good at pretending, but perhaps the saddest part of it all was that he didn't care who knew about his little love affair with alcohol. He didn’t want to be well thought of. He didn’t want soldiers to come up in the street and shake his hand, thanking him for the slaughter he caused. All the deaths bearing down on his conscience just made it right that he should go down without honor or care. He gambled and drank and was deliberately making himself a nuisance waiting for someone to end his misery for him.

A kid was shot down in the street with an old Stark Revolver model.

And Tony thought it was time to take all he had left (which with Stane and Hammer running a campaign against him wasn't as much as it had been, but enough to start over somewhere) and leave it all behind. “Europe,” he told Stane when he came to gloat. “Paris. Women. What else?”

“You're an idiot, Tony. What would your father say?”

He'd turn in his grave probably if he knew what Tony had done to his reputation. But Howard Stark had understood the draw of adventure, and if he'd know that Tony was really going to the frontier instead of Europe, then perhaps he would even have been amused.

Tony packed the few things he thought he needed in the middle of the night. _Blacksmith_ , he thought. _I can at least be a blacksmith. But I'll never make or shoot a gun again._

He packed whiskey for the journey to be on the safe side and only as he was walking out of his old workshop did he stop in front of the broken automaton. “A Vision of the Future.” It had been a nice parlor trick, a machine giving out fortunes that were meant to be amusing. It had never worked that well. Nothing but a broken toy that had been too smart one time. 

Just like him.

Still, it reminded him of a time when he'd still had reason to look to the future as something to be desired. He needed it to have been wrong.

He needed to prove that it was a broken toy. Fumbling he brought out a coin from his jacket pocket and let it tell him a fortune. “Love will make you a better man,” the little card read. He wanted to laugh at it. Love had never been much use to him.

Instead he felt only relief at the silly little card spelling out a stupid destiny for the rich and beautiful. For people who still believed they might be happy one day.

He took his time packing the automaton, thinking that the simple frontier people might find it more amusing than the sophisticated society he was leaving behind. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that he was also taking it as a warning to himself not to ever be undone by his own smarts ever again. He’d never admit it, though.

Not even to himself.

* * *

The Frontier greeted him with dirt and coppery earth and lack of any kind of technology. Even the train could just get you so far. In another life Tony might have been appalled, but now he was looking for a way to forget civilized society and people shaking his hand, because he was the man who’d caused the greatest slaughter in history and ended the Civil War with giving the world a horrible weapon. Even with his diminished fortune he had enough to make a comfortable living in any of these little towns out here.

But comfortable life wasn’t what drew him out here. He was still looking for someone to do for him what he was to cowardly to do himself.

That was the best explanation for why in the vast sea of uninviting, crime-infested lawless towns, he chose Timely to settle down in. The name was deceptive and spoke of a tranquil life that simply didn’t exist out here. They needed a blacksmith, they had a saloon, the saloon had passable cheap whiskey, people got shot on the street if they annoyed the wrong people, but never with a Stark revolver. 

Tony stayed, waiting for life to catch up with him.

* * *

The ladies at the saloon came and went and Tony was happy enough with that arrangement. There was no room for attachment. He didn’t want it. The taste of the Whiskey on his tongue, clouding his mind and helping him sleep at night was all he wanted. Sometimes when his mind didn’t stop looking to the future though, he ended up working for three days on end, creating the next thing that nobody in this town would ever understand or need or even get to see.

Being the drunk blacksmith suited him better than being the genius inventor of mass murder.

Guns and death were still everywhere around him, but out here he didn’t care that much. People on the wrong side of what counted for the law of the lawless ended up dead. Tony wasn’t scared. Wouldn’t it be the ultimate perfection if Tony Stark, greatest gun maker of the country, ended up shot in a drunken saloon brawl? Most days that was the only future he looked forward to.

* * *

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” A tall man stood at the bar, speaking with an Irish lilt that even managed penetrate his alcohol numbed mind.

“Not nearly enough, no,” he slurred. “Tony Stark.” He extended his hand in greeting.

And although the man was frowning at him in disgust, he took the offered hand and shook it, piercing blue eyes meeting his for the first, but not the last time. 

And that was how he met Steve Rogers.

Life in Timely suddenly had new appeal.

* * *

Steve never drank. He still ended up in the saloon every other night to make sure Tony found his way back home. Tony wouldn’t call theirs a friendship exactly.

It was just _something_.

Tony wasn’t going to name it, because that would have meant thinking about his own future too hard and he was through with that.

* * *

When Steve's deputy and best friend Barnes was found dead, killed by Indians outside of town, the sheriff accompanied his widow home and stayed a while to make sure she’d be alright. Tony had seen the anguish on other people’s faces before, but seeing it on Steve’s face it was too close to all the things he didn’t want to think about. So he visited beautiful Emma in her room above the saloon after the funeral, and forgot all blue, piercing eyes and patient Irish singsong voices in her arms for a few hours.

This night when he got stinking drunk at the bar, no Steve was there to get him home. The sour taste in his mouth was worse than he remembered and the hopeless ugliness of Timely and Frontier life seemed worse and more unappealing than ever. It seemed sad and unbearable and it took him two more glasses of cheap whiskey to make his thoughts stop to go in circles, stop turning to the future and the past, and just stop.

Unsteadily he stumbled to his workshop, where he worked, slept and existed when he wasn’t at the saloon.

He let himself fall onto his bed in the corner, Emma’s red lipstick smeared across his cheek, the smell of whiskey on his breath. Another open bottle was sitting on his desk, like a guardian angel, promising to make him forget again if he woke up from nightmares, if he stared to think too hard. As drunk as he was he just passed out and had no idea how long he’d been asleep for, when there was a loud pounding on his door. _A horse,_ he thought after a moment of fear. _An idiot in search of blacksmith._ He hoped it wasn’t another dead body that had people up and about and asking him for guns.

Through the darkness he stumbled to the door, still wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing yesterday at the funeral of James Barnes. Outside the sheriff was waiting. In the darkness of the night his face had not details, no hard edges, but his shoulders were hanging low and he looked lost and lonely. When he took in Tony’s form the familiar frown appeared and then his gaze swiveled away as if he was just thinking better of whatever it was he’d come to do. 

“Stark,” he said slowly, his voice raspy, nearly breaking. “I need a drink.” 

He nearly fell as he scrambled backwards out of the door to let the grieving man in. This was the first and only drink they shared, in the quiet darkness of his disorganized workplace. But it was not the last time Steve appeared at his door in the middle of the night. 

They both had nightmares to keep at bay. 

* * *

Steve was still there when day broke. He shuffled through Tony’s projects and nodded at this and that. He found a piece of an electric wire and held it up. “What is that?” he asked.

Usually Tony hated to talk about his work. Especially with people who had no idea about the finer points of machines. But Steve’s sudden interest was endearing.

This was when Tony realized he had a problem. He was not supposed to form attachments. He was here to forget. To punish himself. Not to be charmed by a stubborn sheriff who on most days didn’t even like him that well. Or maybe the best thing to happen was for him to be charmed by the one person who was unlikely to ever look at him with anything but a long-suffering exasperation.

* * *

For a while things were good. Not “good” in the sense that was true outside this town, but “Timely good”. Weeks turned into months and nobody died. A bit of terrorizing here and there, a beaten up innocent leaving town in fear, dead cattle and ruined farmers – the usual unpleasantness. For the first time since he had arrived in Timely Tony was working on something that he thought was good.

“Stark,” Steve said. “You could do so much good with all the strange things you think up in here. Why do you insist on bringing yourself down with this stuff?” Steve waved around the half empty bottle that had been standing right by his left arm.

Tony didn’t stop whistling the song he’d been whistling when Steve let himself in. “Are you here to arrest me sheriff?”

“Not today,” Steve said seriously, but there was that frown again, the one that was especially for Tony and that always appeared when the good sheriff thought Tony might have done something behind his back that he might be expected to deal with sooner or later. “I might have to keep you for a few days if you end up scaring the poor girl, they sent to teach school here, again by passing out on her doorstep.”

“That was one time,” Tony said and didn’t whistle anymore, but instead hummed the melody now. 

“I mean it. The next time you get that drunk, I’ll put you in a cell until you’re sober.” It sounded like a half-hearted threat.

“You’d do anything to get me to spend time with you. I know I’m irresistible.” 

“You’re a nuisance.”

“Thanks,” Tony said, not losing his cheer.

And Steve just stood by the desk and watched him work for several minutes. 

“That looks like weapon,” he said, after Tony had nearly forgotten he was even there.

“It’s life insurance. A trick up my sleeve if I need one. And who knows when I need it next time in this town.” And when had he suddenly decided that he needed to go on living so badly?

“Should you be telling me this?”

Tony laughed. “I should tell you to get a few tricks up your sleeves, too. I wouldn’t want to be sheriff in this town.”

Steve grew still immediately and then in a quiet voice asked: “Do you ever regret coming out here?”

Tony froze mid motion, his heart missing a beat. He regretted the reasons for coming here maybe, but he and the stubborn Irish sheriff would never have met if he hadn’t come to Timely. “No,” he said. “Who would drive silent Dr. Banner to rages and keep you busy if it weren’t for me?”

Steve nodded, but he looked like he was pondering his own answer more than ever. He was a strong believer in justice, too good for a place like this sad excuse for a mining town in the grip of men like Fisk and his thugs. It wasn’t a good combination. But Tony would rather die than see the light go out in his blue eyes.

* * *

When Steve made his final stand, Tony lay passed out in a drunken stupor. By the time he finally was awake enough to act, Steve’s blood was already mingling with the dirty street. He had barely heard his final words, his final cry and for the first time in ten years there was a gun in his hand and he was using it, his hands shaking, his aim off, coming close, but still missing the mark.

There was a gaping hole in the Steve’s back, but if felt like that was his own body, his own heart bleeding out. 

He had started looking to the future again and now here was his punishment. The only good man left in this town, dead and gone. His friend. The sheriff. Steve.

He could feel the hysteria creep up on him, words bubbling out of his mouth and anger rising along side the despair, as the women ushered him away. Steve was still breathing even, stubborn bastard that he was. And then the sounds and squealing and he retched inside the doorway, before they even had him inside the house.

He could have stopped this, could have stopped him. He could have saved him. Could have made a difference for once.

But he’d been drunk and out of it and useless.

And now the only person he cared about in the world was gone. He’d lived with nightmares for the last 10 years. Without Steve the world was an even darker place.

He wasn’t sure he would be able to face tomorrow.

* * *

No Steve came to drag him home, no Steve came to take the bottle from his hand and insult his intelligence. The night was cold and clear and Tony couldn’t bare being alone, couldn’t bear being near people. So he ended up sitting out here alone.

Steve’s face was haunting his every thought.

The gap he felt, the open wound inside his heart was hurting physically. His heart hadn’t given out yet, but it felt like it should have. What was he supposed to do now? 

Damn Steve the stubborn bastard for bringing this on himself.

Damn him and his damn drinking for not being ready when he’d been needed.

Damn this town for being the pit of snakes and fear that it was.

Damn himself for _feeling_ , for forming attachments.

He took another swig from the bottle and sagged in on himself. Crouched and forlorn he sat on his porch, not sure he was ever again going to move. It would be so much easier to drink himself to death right here on this spot and end this misery once and for all. The great Tony Stark, killer of the Confederacy, common drunk and expert nuisance, drinking himself to death just feet away from where the good sheriff had been shot in the back by a coward. Dying as he had lived. Not going down like Steve, but just giving up.

It seemed like the only thing he was good for.

A man walked up to him then, stepping past him and Tony had trouble seeing him clearly. He noticed the naked feet on the wood and only spoke to him when he made a beeline for his broken automaton. And somehow it all ended with him holding a small card with a fortune, the stranger's words about it being his still ringing in his ears. 

“There is no future for you.” 

It was like the ultimate joke and laughter bubbled up his chest and out of his mouth to sound through the night and he couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop, until suddenly he could, because his head hurt and he was going to be sick.

But after the short spell, the rage rose up in him again.

He knew exactly what he was going to do. It was time to be a man Steve would have liked. He could at least go down like that man, even if he’d completely failed at being that man in life. 

For Steve.

For once he could see the future clearly. 

This was his legacy. Love would help him be a better man.


End file.
